Mother as first guru….

This will just be a short post. It is a belated post about a session that I attended with Alakh in May on the 14th. It was the week before a LOT of uni work was due, and unfortunately the finer details of it have disappeared under piles of paper, sleepless nights, a fair few too many coffees and days spent in my jarmies wishing I didn’t have to do the dishes or work tomorrow…..

A few things have clicked into place recently that I have traced back to that session, though, and I’m posting to get a bit more clarity around it, as well as for the pure enjoyment of documenting and sharing my process! In life I find that often there will be something going on with me that I am vaguely aware of, it starts off like a background noise although I can still ignore it, and I can even think myself into believing I don’t know it is there. It’s this protective aspect of being in denial that allows us some space when we aren’t quite ready to face something yet. People can stay in this place for years, lifetimes I suppose. In this moment, as I write, I can see that this session brought up a lot for me, and I wasn’t ready to acknowledge it, which is why even as I began writing this I was analysing the session from the perspective of “why it didn’t work out”. I guess because I practically got up off the mat and jumped straight into the chaos of juggling (rhymes with struggling?!) assignments and family life that I felt like it was ineffective, or, I that I didn’t give it my full attention, or I didn’t set a clear intention that resounded with my deepest calling in that moment. Where was the peace? The joy? The revelations that often follow?

It kind of played on my mind that there wasn’t a clear learning form the breathwork session itself…the main thing that I realised during it, is the recurring “feeling of disappointment that I haven’t done enough”. This comes up for me pretty regularly (every time I lay down for a session I think “I haven’t set a clear enough intention, I haven’t done enough!”!), so it didn’t feel very ground breaking. And as I left I felt resigned to trudge back to the daily grind of end of term last minute submissions with no major transformation.

A couple of weeks later, after the storm of submitting stuff had passed, I was listening to a Sounds True podcast with Mariana Caplan (Counsellor and Professor of Yogic and Transpersonal Psychologies) talking about her book The Guru Question (www.soundstrue.com) . During the interview she relates the feelings of being completely home and held when she entered her relationship with her Guru, and how he was clear from the beginning that he would not enter into a childish relationship with her. She realised then that she needed to, at the very least, be willing to enter this relationship as an adult. Of course, and as she recounts, this didn’t mean that she didn’t play out childish patterns, but did mean that she was willing to see them as they were. This describes the phenomenon of projecting or transferring our parental “stuff” onto other people (pretty much anyone really!) particularly within a therapeutic relationship. Originally it is a Freudian concept that is now widely accepted. It is now a pretty mainstream idea that manifests in everyday life through comments such as “she has a father complex”, and such.

I guess breathwork takes this concept to another level of significance. Breathwork brings the direct experience that our earliest experiences in this life, from conception, in utero, during birth and early childhood, shape the way we approach every relationship and interaction , the way we view the very fabric of the world. Our experience creates the lens though which we perceive the world, and thus the way we expect others to behave and the way we respond to others. That is a little clumsy in describing such a complex occurrence; however it is very difficult to explain just how all encompassing the effects of our decisions or assumptions made during this time are. And how limiting.

Anyway, as I listened to Mariana and Tammy discuss their experiences, I felt the armor of denial melting away a little. I recalled the hot flash of irritation that flooded me that day as my teacher dismissed an idea I had. I recognised the hardening of my heart against her as a similar feeling towards my own mother when I felt rejected as she nurtured one of my sibling “rather than” me. I felt the feelings of being second best, and heard the voice trying to impress drowning out my authentic self. I recalled the absolute shrinking away from facing the feelings or worse having to talk about them with my teacher! I thought, how can I say that I am so annoyed at you right now, even if I am able to express that I know that I am projecting my stuff onto her. I am scared to criticize, and, it dawns on me, even more scared of the intimacy that may come if I do.

So far from being a non event, this session was like skirting around a major topic, and interestingly the topic we are studying in the theory aspect of breathwork is conscious relating… the next two sessions I will have are around the mother father relationships… life is so beautifully synchronistic….

"Counsellors need to be in touch with their spirituality, the inarticulateness of knowing, meeting, remembering, sharing, journeying together. The way into these experiences is often unexpected and found in areas in which we are less competent and more vulnerable, using less-dominant traits, less-used senses, in metaphor, through nature, in the shared but incomplete intimacy of the privilege of the counselling or supervision room"